The Eight Most Crushing Law Firm Implosions In The Nation's History

Once-powerful law firm Dewey & LeBoeuf had a breathtaking fall last month before going bankrupt.The problems that sank Dewey – from disloyal partners to way too much debt – have also plagued other firms that went down in spectacular fashion in recent years.

Now that Dewey is decomposing in bankruptcy court, we thought we’d reflect on some law firms that have suffered the hardest and farthest falls from greatness.

Firm: Finley Kumble

Year of death: 1987

Cause of death: Finley Kumble grew from roughly 50 lawyers to 700 attorneys in less than a decade by aggressively poaching lawyers from other firms, industry experts said.

Like Dewey that came after it, Finley also promised Senators and other superstars in the legal world exorbitant salaries to come on board, The New York Times reported at the time.

'That was the first sort of modern law firm that was put together overnight through raiding other partners,' Robert Hillman, an industry expert and professor at the University of California, Davis law school, told BI.

But a firm composed entirely of new lawyers without long-term ties proved disastrous.

Heavy debt and infighting ultimately killed the firm even though at the time it was the fourth-largest in the country. The downfall was so precipitous that it inspired the book 'Shark Tank: Greed, Politics, and the Collapse of Finley Kumble, One of America's Largest Law Firms.'

This firm's fearful leader had his head in the sand.

Firm: Brobeck, Phleger, & Harrison

Year of death: 2003

Cause of death: San Francisco law firm Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison ran into money trouble after the dot-com collapse, but its former chairman Tower Snow kept saying again and again that the firm wouldn't resort to layoffs.

'When their fortunes started to decline, the chairman announced that nobody would get laid off, which was nice of him to say,' Jonathan Landers, a nationally recognised expert on bankruptcy law, told BI.

But, he added, 'Most people can't support large numbers of people hanging around, waiting for work to appear.'

The 77-year-old firm lost scores of lawyers anyway, The New York Times reported in 2003. It had 900 lawyers in 2000 but only 500 when it finally sputtered out three years later.

Coudert was known for its huge international presence, especially in France, and foreign offices can be difficult to manage from the U.S., bankruptcy expert Landers, told BI.

'They had a lot of foreign offices; they were almost like a franchise,' Landers said. 'One of the problems they had was they didn't have central control over those offices and the money in those offices.'

If a foreign office failed to make money, then Coudert had to go through significant red tape if it wanted to shut that office down, Landers said.

And he hinted that foreign offices might not make as much money as those stateside. 'The lawyers in France don't work that hard,' Landers said. 'They just don't.'

Firm:Thelen LLP

Year of death: 2008

Year of death: Thelen LLP took a nosedive after an ill-advised merger with Brown Raysman Millstein Felder & Steiner in 2006, which some legal experts said had way too much debt, the ABA Journal reported in 2008.

'It just kind of didn't work, and they wound up losing a lot of people who didn't want to stick around in a newly merged company,' Steven Harper, a BigLaw partner turned analyst, told BI.

High-profile partner defections became 'toxic' and fed on themselves, legal recruiter Gary Klein told the San Francisco Chronicle after Thelen's demise in 2008.

'It became Darwinian,' Klein said, referring to the need to jump ship to survive.

This firm hemorrhaged partners for months before it finally bled out.

Under those deals, which clients started demanding more during the recession, Howrey only got paid if it won a case.

Firm: Dewey & LeBoeuf LLP

Year of death: 2012

Cause of death: Well, according to ex-partner Henry Bunsow, Dewey's top brass ran a Ponzi scheme. He recently sued the big bosses at his bankrupt firm, claiming they inflated revenues to lure him to Dewey.